In the wake of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other people of color at the hands of law enforcement, there are now calls throughout the country to defund police departments. On the surface, this may sound like people are looking to cut all funding from the police.

“Some groups believe that you can completely defund the police department and go without. I think that is unrealistic. Most people, the majority of folks know that is unrealistic,” Kevin Robinson said.

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Robinson is a former assistant Phoenix Police chief and is currently a lecturer in the ASU School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

“What is realistic is looking very hard at a police department’s budget and figuring ‘Are there areas where the PD is not accomplishing its mission in certain areas?'" Robinson said. "If there’s a specific program and it’s not accomplishing the organizational mission, maybe you don’t need to be doing that particular program. That being the case, what do you do with the money? That money can actually be re-allocated ... to the city general fund, and then what can happen is it can be re-directed to social service programs, after school programs — things along those lines that have been proven in the past to help reduce crime in certain areas.”

Robinson speaks from experience — as assistant chief, he ran multiple budgeting models looking at the best use of department funds, which included a half-billion dollar budget.

“We would go through exercises where we would reduce our budget by 2-4-6-8-10% and want to know what does the organization look like? What would you cut? And those monies usually would go to smaller departments in the city — for instance, Parks and Rec — so they could afford to open their pools or keep their pools open longer in areas that are disadvantaged in certain parts of the city,” Robinson said.

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